


Thread Together

by YoGrossDude



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Feelings, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 11:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10615638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YoGrossDude/pseuds/YoGrossDude
Summary: An "extra scene" of sorts in which Aloy and Erend break some machines together after the events in Meridian. Major game spoilers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Babby's first fanfiction in a long, long time. I love these two and figured I'd write something. Constructive criticism is very welcome; I'm always trying to improve!

The arrow strikes the Scrapper right in the eye and lodges there, sending up a shower of sparks and shattered glass. Aloy yells at the machine, fierce and loud, and Erend can't do anything more than blink as it turns its heavy body away from him, towards her. The left side of its head is dented and mangled, thanks to his hammer and a lifetime at a forge, but his blow didn't kill it instantly, like it had for the other one.

His legs would be mulch now, if it wasn't for her.

It screams, a sound like metal scraping against granite, spiked jaws spinning so fast the nail-teeth spark, but Aloy doesn't back down. She nocks a new arrow, this one tipped with dark silver - wolfstone, he thinks, or white copper, maybe, by the glint of it - and letting it fly. It hits the machine hard enough to make it stagger back, and a large chunk of it goes flying; Erend barely scrambles out of the way in time. The piece clangs loudly where it falls, inches from his left boot, and kicks up a cloud of sand and dirt that stings his eyes and leaves him coughing.

The Scrapper roars at her, damaged head sparking, charging forward as she nocks two more of her black arrows at once and sends them flying; almost too fast for him to follow, she nocks another set and lets those loose half a breath later. They all strike the Scrapper with expert precision as it thunders towards her, shrieking, chunks of it flying off with every clanging impact. Aloy roars right back, a final pair of arrows slam into its remaining eye, and, a hairsbreadth from the Scrapper's spinning, grinding jaws, she rolls nimbly away into the tall grass nearby.

It all happens in the span of a few breaths. Erend stares, his hammer still raised, stunned.

The metal beast collapses heavily, and the sparking glow dims from the Scrapper's shattered eyes. Aloy still hasn't reappeared from the grass. Unbidden, he thinks of Ersa’s bloodied, beaten face, her tired smile, the light leaving her eyes.

“ _Aloy!_ ” His throat feels choked shut, but the cry tears out of it painfully all the same.

He runs, really _runs,_ to where he last saw her, but she's already moving to stand by the time he gets close. He still reaches for her, though, hand closing around hers to help her back to her feet. The solid strength of her grip, real and warm, dulls the worst of his panic. Aloy gets up easily, swings tinglingly close, then steadies her feet. She brushes flecks of dirt and metal dust off her clothes with the hand he isn't still clinging to like a child.

She's fine. Of course she is.

“You alright?” he asks anyway, because it might do something to quiet his pounding heart. It thuds against his ribs like a hammer. He swears his armor shakes with every beat.

“Yeah,” she tells him, breathless, “it got me, though.” She grimaces.

“Where?” He drops her hand, far too late.

“My back.” Aloy turns so he can get a better look.

It's a bad hit, but not an awful one. The leather and fabric of her Nora tunic is shredded where it struck her, and it tore just as easily through her flesh. Blood oozes from a red fissure in her shoulder, a hand long down her back and flayed wide in the center, dug deep by a tooth in the Scrapper’s nasty, grinding jaws. Erend grits his teeth and hisses loud in sympathy. Aloy is silent. He would've been howling.

“That,” he says, “is going to need stitching.”

“I don't think I can reach.” Even saying that, she certainly looks like she's going to _try_ , wincing as she lifts the arm on her wounded shoulder, and he's suddenly half terrified that she's going to make it worse.

“Hang on! Hang on.”

She stops abruptly, both eyebrows up in surprise. It's not a look he's seen on her before, and it hits him like a kick to the gut, jumbles his words. “I, uh, I could do it.”

“You could?” She doesn't sound convinced.

“ _Yeah_ ,” he replies, more than a little defensively, “Listen, you don’t get far as an Oseram if you can't stitch. It's as important as being able to hit stuff with a hammer. Or drinking. A lot.”

Her face breaks into a reluctant smirk.

“Okay then,” she says, after mulling it over for a few moments, and then she simply turns around and walks away. He follows, avoiding the snapped saplings and metal hewn footprints the Scrappers left in their wake.

_“Want to help me hunt?”_ was all Aloy said when he practically stumbled into her right outside the palace, stunned stupid because he was sure she was long gone by now. There were a hundred thousand things Erend needed to do before leaving for the Claim, but there was no way he was ever about to refuse her, not with her green eyes so bright and eager they snapped something in his chest broken. He followed her right out of the gate and into the village with barely anything more than his armor and his hammer and his heart in his throat, and he'd do it a hundred times over.

He just wishes he'd done a better job at killing machines than getting her hurt.

They stop at a small clearing. Aloy gestures vaguely to a knee-high rock and sits right down in front of it without a word. It'd be easy to take as an insult had it come from anyone else, but he likes to think he's learned enough about the Nora, enough about her, to know that she’s giving him something precious here: her trust.

And he's going to try his damndest not to ruin it.

“Thanks for saving my ass, by the way,” Erend tells her, settling himself on the rock as best he could. He means it.

“I told you that armor makes you too slow.” It’s a very Aloy thing to say, but the tone in her voice is teasing instead of critical, which catches him off-guard almost as badly as the Scrapper had.

“Yeah, well, don't knock it til you've worn it,” he counters, grinning hugely to make up for the nervous knot rolling low in his gut, slamming a fist to his chest for emphasis. The studs shake in reply. “You should try it sometime.”

She rolls her eyes at him over her shoulder and removes her pack from her belt to her side, untying the fastenings and leaving it open.

“You have any dreamwillow in there?” he asks, carefully rummaging through her pack. It's well organized - of course it is - and it's easy to locate her little cache of medicine. He plucks up one of the pointed steel needles he finds there.

“Why would I need dreamwillow?” Her brow is furrowed.

“Uh, because stitching this is going to hurt?”

“It can't hurt any worse than getting it,” is her answer. He frowns at that, even though she can't see it.

“Well if you don't feel like needlessly suffering,” Erend tells her, still searching her pack ( _where the blast is her thread?_ ), “I have some snowflame salve with me.”

“Snowflame?”

“Yeah, it numbs the skin. The Carja use it all the time. There’s dreamwillow in it, but you don't drink it at all, so you don't have to worry about getting dizzy or sleepy or anything.” Not that he thinks even dreamwillow would make her do anything she didn't want to do. At last, he finds the thread neatly twined in a small ball near the bottom of the pouch. It reeks horribly for some reason, enough to make him scrunch up his nose. Prize finally in hand, he looks up from her pack.

“Hey, so don't take this the wrong way, but why does your thread smell like --”

The rest of the words die in his throat.

Aloy is pulling her tunic over her head, her armor already neatly piled to her left. Her back is bare, save for the wrap of her breast bind. It's more of her skin than he's ever seen before.

_Fire and Spit_...

“It smells because the Nora treat it with herbs,” she says, snapping back his attention, slowly rotating her shoulders. She doesn't seem to notice he didn't finish the rest of the question. He watches the muscles ripple under her skin as she stretches. “It prevents wounds from putrefying.”

“Oh,” he says, somehow. His eyes are drawn to the peppering of freckles on the small of her back.

She half glances at him over her shoulder. He can feel his face burning, but it's almost sundown, and he hopes there isn't enough light for her to see.

“Is there a problem?”

“No,” he lies immediately, shifting on the rock, suddenly uncomfortable, “No problem.” He clears his throat. “So...did you want the salve?”

Aloy sighs. “Fine.”

Erend ignores the prickling forge-fire building just below his navel when he gently gathers her hair and moves it out of the way of her wound, fingertips grazing her neck. _Flame-hair_ , like they say back home, and it is, red as rust, bright as embers. He swallows, hard.

He grabs the salve from his pouch, popping open the lid. Aloy’s skin notwithstanding, he still has enough presence of mind to keep his gloves on when he scoops a generous lump of snowflame out of its container so his fingers don't numb.

“It might sting at first,” he says lamely. She gives him a raised eyebrow and a half-smile over her shoulder for that one, but he doesn't regret it.

He starts the salve right on the red edge of her wound. It's made up of dreamwillow, boar fat, Scrapper’s Sap, and a hot, pungent blend of spices he can never remember the names of: a potent combination that burns wounds clean and then chills them numb. Aloy makes a small noise when it makes contact with her wound -- nothing he would dare call a cry of pain -- but he stops immediately the second he hears it, hand darting back like she's burned him.

“Sorry,” he says. Stupidly.

“You warned me.” She gestures for him to keep going and he does, albeit reluctantly. Her face scrunches up and she hisses. “Pain like this is good, anyway,” she says through her teeth, as he slathers it on as carefully as he can, “The burning means it cleans the wound.” The line sounds very practiced, like it's been told to her a million times before. Like _she's_ told it to herself a million times before.

“Doesn't mean you have to like it,” he says, and earns a rueful, strained chuckle that feels far better than it should.

The air is dry but cooling, now that the sun has started to sink below the horizon. Even in the fading light, he can see this isn't the first wound on her back she's ever gotten -- there's a short, puckered scar that juts angrily across her spine, and it isn't the only one. There's another one where her ribs start he notices when he leans in to apply the salve, thin and still raw, like the one on her throat she brushes her fingers against when she thinks no one's looking.

She wouldn't have a new one now if he hadn't been a damn idiot.

Erend forcibly pushes the guilt down and takes a light, experimental poke at the salve covered skin at the edge of her wound. Aloy is quiet, which means that the salve is working, or she's somehow even tougher than he thinks. He watches her carefully when he pokes again in a different snowflame drenched spot -- he’s pretty sure not even Aloy would be able to mask a flinch twice. Satisfied it's working, he carefully threads the needle and knots it tight -- more difficult than he's used to in the fading light, but he manages fine.

“I'm gonna start,” he tells her, and she murmurs an affirmative. _Try not to move_ is what he would've said to anyone else, particularly Ersa's... _his_ men, who can get beaten with a hundred spears and arrows and not make a sound, then whimper like children at the hands of healer, but she's been stone-still since they've sat down. He peels off his gloves so he can be more precise. She's warm when he places a tentative hand on her back, and his fingers spark where he makes brushing contact with her skin.

The edges of her wound luckily aren't ragged, so there's no need to cut her skin straight, and the needle is sharp and pierces through easily. He threads it through to the other edge of her wound, pushes through, pulls the edges of skin a little closer together, and starts again.

It's a comfortable kind of quiet, save for the crickets and a lone, calling bird. He's been in Meridian so long he forgets what silence is, sometimes. The stitches are coming together in nice, neat little rows, and he'll be finished soon.

“The Vanguard could've taken care of the Scrappers before I headed out,” he says, cracking the silence wide open and _why did he even open his mouth_? “You didn't have to come here, I mean,” he sputters when she gives him a Look over her shoulder, “Not that I didn't appreciate your help, you know, because you're really good at killing machines. I was just wondering why you decided to do it, since you were on your way to leave.”

Maybe he can try smacking his own head in with his hammer, later. It would probably improve his conversation.

Aloy puffs out a small sigh. “I figured you'd be too busy, until I saw you after speaking with Avad. He was the one who mentioned the Scrappers were encroaching on the village, and most of the Carja soldiers were still busy dealing with what happened with Dervahl.”

“Personal request from the Sun King, huh?” he says, grinning.

“He never actually _asked_ , so I guess it wasn't really a request,” she replies, dry as Carja sands, and he laughs as he finishes another stitch, over halfway through. He's awfully fond of her sarcasm, when he isn't the brunt of it.

“So, what else did _His Luminescence_ want to talk to you about? Marad said you were up there for a while. Couldn't have all been not-requests about machines coming close to Meridian Village.”

“Well, he asked me if I would be with him.”

He's extremely grateful he just finished that stitch.

“O-oh, yeah?” He means to say it casually - it doesn't turn out that way, rough and low and scrapes at his throat on the way out. He feels like a hot iron plunged into an ice barrel. Stupid, _stupid_ to think he'd be the only person to ever notice how amazing she was. She _saved all of Meridian_. Of course she'd catch Avad's eye.

Was Ersa so easily brushed aside? He never knew for sure what had been going on there, between them -- Ersa was evasive, to say the least, even to him, and he never blamed her -- but if there had been something…

Avad, smiling down at Aloy, tossing away every feeling he ever had for Ersa with her corpse barely cold. The thought makes him sick.

Besides even that, Aloy had to know it wouldn't be a marriage -- Meridian's Sun King wedding a _Nora_ would have every noble storming out of the city to Sunfall the second that announcement hit anyone's ears -- but even still, Erend knows Avad wouldn't give her anything less than his best.

Avad would be good to her. Better than anything _he_ could do, that's for damn sure.

“I told him that was probably a bad idea,” Aloy continues, and he _hates_ how relieved he feels, all that prickling uneasiness leaving just as fast as it came, like opening a valve and letting out the steam. But now that she's said it, he _can't_ _believe it_.

“ _Why_?” he blurts.

“He's mourning,” she tells him, simply, “I just remind him of what he lost. He didn't...” She trails off, and he can see her teeth chewing on her bottom lip for a moment, “Avad needs time to heal, not someone to fill a hole that they can't fit in. He wants Ersa back, not me.”

Ersa's name, out loud, makes his chest tighten and the corners of his eyes sting. “Oh,” he says, again, wiping at them quickly. His voice wavers, and Aloy shifts a little under his hands.

He'll have to talk with Avad, when he gets back to Meridian. About a lot of things.

The quiet returns, just as comfortable as before, and this time he keeps his fat trap shut. He finishes the last of the stitches in little time, ties the final knot at the wound’s end, and cuts the thread from the needle with his teeth. From there, it's a quick dive back into her pouch to grab a clean bandage and a small bit of sap to keep it in place, and he smooths it firmly onto her skin.

“There,” he says, more satisfied than he should be, “finished.”

Aloy moves her shoulder in a slow, wide circle and the bandage moves with her. “Thank you, Erend.”

“Hey, no problem.”

“And thank you for the snowflame. It made the wound a lot easier to deal with.”

“Well,” he starts awkwardly, and focuses pointedly on returning her supplies to their proper place, adding the capped bottle of the rest of his snowflame to her bag, “not everything has to hurt.”

It’s an incredibly stupid thing to say, now that he hears it aloud, and he regrets every word the second it leaves his mouth. But to his complete and utter bewilderment, she pauses, and a small crease forms between her brows, like the thought has never once occurred to her before. And why would it have? Abandoned and treated like trash by her own people, what should’ve been her proudest day nothing but death and pain, trying to find answers no one seems able to give.

Her life has been nothing but hurts.

The puzzled look doesn't leave her face as Aloy moves to stand, and he follows suit. He coughs politely and turns around when she starts pulling her tunic and armor back on, staring at the sky. He catches the last little red sliver of the sun before it finally sinks below the horizon. _The day rusts like everything else,_ as his grandmother used to say. With the Scrappers killed, Aloy will probably leave tonight, and, if he can somehow manage to get everything done before then, he’ll stomp back to the Claim with Ersa’s body by first light.

He sighs, heavy. Aloy moves to stand beside him, close enough so he can feel the heat of her. There's a stupid urge bubbling up; he wants to ask if she can wait until he gets back, so he can go with her. Like she needs his bumbling ass to get in her way.

So instead, Erend turns to her and says, “Guess I'll see you around.”

Aloy’s green eyes shine in the moonlight when they meet his, and she smiles, really smiles, so it crinkles at the corners. It nearly kills him.

“Yeah.” She pauses, fingers the bone charm on her necklace. “It was...nice to see you. Before you leave.”

The words start a spark storm under his skin. “It, uh, was nice to see you, too,” he says, and swallows thickly. There's a very real chance he'll never see her again. “Just, uh, be careful out there, okay?”

Yeah, she'll definitely remember _that_ emotional farewell.

“I’ll try,” she says wryly. She taps her Focus, and he hears the telltale beat of a Strider's metal feet on the ground. Its blue light is nearly blinding in the dark when it appears in front of them, snorting as it slows. It's safe, he knows that much, thanks to...whatever it is she does to machines, but his grip tightens around his hammer all the same. Aloy swings herself on top of the Strider's back with practiced ease, settling herself comfortable.

Erend doesn't believe in anything he can't see, and he severely doubts the Sun gives a slag about anything down here, but if the Nora have it right, he thinks their All-Mother would like Aloy, outcast or not. He imagines they're something similar, both strong and fierce and brave and beautiful, true huntresses, leaving a trail of shattered machines in their wakes. Aloy's someone worth the favor of a Goddess like that.

Someone worth keeping safe.

She stares down at him from atop the Strider, smiling, a little. He tries to commit every detail of how she looks there to memory. “Goodbye, Erend,” she says.

“‘Bye, Aloy.” The things he’s feeling right now are terrifying, overwhelming. He wants to say more, so much more _\-- don't die, don't forget me, don't leave. Wait, please wait, not for long, and I'll come back._ _I'll go with you, wherever you need to go. I'll follow you until you find what you're looking for._

_I'll follow you forever._

Erend doesn't say any of it, of course, just grins like an idiot as she turns and rides off into the night. He stays there until he can't see her any more, and stays a little longer after that, sighing in the dark.

Aloy will find her answers, of that he has no doubts. Maybe he will see her again, he thinks.

He almost believes it.


End file.
